Читать книгу Internal Affairs - Jessica Andersen - Страница 8

In that first moment of recognition, Sara’s brain threatened to overload with shock and an awful, undeniable sense of hope. She wanted to scream, wanted to laugh, wanted to shriek, “What the hell is going on here? Where have you been? What have you been doing? Why did you let us—let me—think you were dead?”

Instead, she forced herself to do what she did best—she buried her emotions, smoothing out the roller coaster.

Clicking over to doctor mode, she shoved her feelings aside, bundling them up along with all the questions that echoed inside her skull. Where had he been for the past four months? What had happened to him? Whose grave had she stood over, dry-eyed but grieving? Whose blood was spattered on his face, arms and hands? It wasn’t all his, that was for sure.

He couldn’t answer those questions now, though, and might not ever be able to unless she worked fast. Instinct told her he was close to dying a second time.

Sara’s heart stuttered a little when she cataloged Romo’s injuries and vitals. His breathing was too shallow, the pulse at his throat too slow. And his eyes, when she peeled back his lids, were fixed, the pupils unequal in size, indicating a concussion, or worse.

Shock, she thought, head injury, and… She checked him over without rolling him, hissing in a breath when she zeroed in on the wet seep of blood beneath the jacket. A gunshot wound.

The hole was ragged at the edges, indicating that the bullet hadn’t been going full power when it hit him, and the bruise track suggested it had deflected off his shoulder blade and done more damage to his trapezius muscle than his skeleton. The skin around the injury was inflamed and angry, the blood clotted in some places, still seeping in others. She pressed on his back near the wound, digging into the lax muscles on either side of his spine, hoping the bullet had stayed close to the surface, praying it hadn’t fragmented and deflected into vital organs.

He groaned in obvious pain, but didn’t move. His hand had fallen away from her ankle, as though having made that effort he’d lapsed more deeply unconscious.

She couldn’t find the bullet, but confirmed that his reflexes were decent in his legs, and, having removed his boots, his feet. Her brain spun. The basic exam didn’t indicate an immediate spine injury, but the bullet could lie near the vital areas, poised to shift and impinge on the critical nerves if she made a wrong move. She needed more information, needed an X-ray, needed—hell, she needed a doctor who had more experience with living tissue than dead, one who wasn’t faintly unnerved to feel warmth beneath her fingertips.

The heat of him, so unlike the refrigerated flesh she touched on a daily basis, unsettled her. More, it wasn’t just any living body. It was Romo’s living body, which should’ve been impossible.

Where the hell have you been? she wanted to shout at him. How could you let everyone think you were dead?

By “everyone” she meant herself and his parents, because while the funeral had been well attended, and dozens of cops, agents and other staffers had railed against the prison riot that had taken his life, as far as she’d been able to tell, she had been one of the few who had truly mourned his death, one of the few who’d truly considered him a friend, even after everything that had happened between them.

His parents had been there. They’d been shattered and disbelieving, and Sara hadn’t had the strength to say anything to them, hadn’t wanted to try to define her nonrelationship with their son. And maybe she hadn’t wanted to admit that she’d been grieving more for what she and Romo’d had in the past, for the man she’d thought him, not the man he’d turned out to be.

Who, apparently, was alive, though not well.

Crouched beside him, one hand on his warm, bloodsoaked shoulder, Sara fought an inner battle. She should call for an ambulance, get him to the hospital. The surgeons could deal with the bullet, the cops with his fate. She didn’t owe him anything.

But instead of reaching for the phone, she picked up his note and scanned it a second time. Nobody can know that I’m here. That was straightforward enough, though difficult under the circumstances, when she needed to get him to an ER. Life or death. But whose life or death. Hers? His? A larger threat?

Prior to his death—or what she’d thought was his death—Romo had been working with the BCCPD and occasionally the FBI, using his undeniable computer skills in an effort to ferret out the suspected terrorist conspirators within the BCCPD. Though he’d set his sights on Sara’s office as the center of the conspiracy—no doubt thanks in part to Proudfoot’s influence—Romo had also been looking at other departments, other cops. Then he’d been killed—supposedly—in the prison riot.

The rumors had said his death had been no accident, that he’d been getting too close to the conspirators and they’d managed to take him out.

From there, Sara realized, it was a short leap to believing that his apparently faked death was related to the case, too. What if he’d used it to drop under deep cover? Chelsea’s fiancé, Fax, had pretended to be a killer in order to get himself incarcerated in the ARX Supermax, in an effort to get close to al-Jihad. It was certainly possible that Romo, though a detective rather than an agent, had done something similar. If she assumed he was the lone man who’d escaped the net of the manhunt, then maybe he’d fled the terrorists because they’d found him out, or betrayed him.

But if that were the case, why hadn’t he turned himself in to the members of the task force? If not during the chase itself, then why not later? Why had he come to her? Why tell her to keep his presence a secret?

Damn you, she thought as she stared down at him, trying to figure out if that scenario really made sense, or if she just wanted it to. Her hypothesis did fit the evidence, she decided, but the same evidence would also support the reverse, namely that he’d faked his death so he could drop off the grid entirely and go to work for the terrorists, then got separated from them in the melee of the task force raid on the terrorists’ cabin.

Both hypotheses fit, but which was the right one? Or was there yet another explanation she hadn’t come up with?

“That doesn’t matter right now,” she said aloud. “What matters is what you’re going to do with him.” She glanced at the note, brain spinning.

She knew Romo, knew what he’d been through as a child, and how those experiences had shaped the man he’d become. That, more than anything, told her logic favored the undercover theory. The Romo she’d known had been all about justice, sometimes to the exclusion of all other, softer emotions. She had to believe he’d been working for the good guys. That didn’t explain why he wanted to stay in hiding, but it did suggest that if the wrong people found out he was still alive, he could be in very real danger.

Which, if she followed that line of thought to its conclusion, explained why he’d come to her if he felt he couldn’t go to whoever he’d been working for. She’d had her full medical training before deciding to specialize in pathology, and kept a small set of supplies on hand in case of emergencies. He would’ve known that, would’ve known she could patch him up. And, damn him, he would’ve known that she’d be unable to turn him away.

Shaking her head, Sara stared down at him. “You’re really a bastard, you know that?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even twitch. Which was so not helpful.

She could call an ambulance, then dragoon one of her trusted cop friends to watch over him. There might be suspicions of complicity within the BCCPD and local FBI field office, but she knew for a fact that Chelsea, Fax, Cassie, Seth, Alyssa and Tucker were among the good guys. There was no way any of them were involved with the terrorists. They’d help keep Romo safe.

But Sara stalled, because he’d come to her. He’d asked her to keep his presence a secret. Maybe, just maybe, it made the most sense to follow his instructions for the moment, and make her decisions once he was conscious and could fill in some of the blanks.

Warning bells chimed at the back of her brain, but she couldn’t deal with them just then. She needed to make a decision, and it had better be the right one. Except when she came down to it, she knew she’d made her decision the moment she stepped toward him rather than away; the moment she’d touched his injured shoulder and felt warm skin, and remembered what they’d once been to each other.

“Fine,” she said, her words seeming too loud in the silence of her secluded home. “Have it your way. You always did.” Reaching for a double handful of his clothing—and steeling herself to be a doctor rather than a woman who still, inexplicably, wanted to weep—she said, “I need to roll you. This is going to hurt.”

She doubted he could hear her. The warning was more for her own sake than his, because she wasn’t used to dealing with patients who still had their pain responses intact.

Doing her best to minimize the amount she twisted and moved him, in case the bullet had ended up someplace grim, she levered him partway up and checked for an exit wound or other injuries on the front of his body. She didn’t find either, which was both good news and bad: good news because his injury seemed localized and treatable, assuming the bullet hadn’t punched through to something internal; bad news because she didn’t know where the damned thing had gone.

Easing him back down onto his flat stomach, trying not to remember how he’d slept like that, his face smashed into the pillow, his long limbs sprawled toward her, onto her, some part of him always touching some part of her, she rose and headed deeper into the house, through the smallish, oddly arranged rooms that she’d decorated to blend one into the next, with neutral, mossy colors and richly patterned curtains.

She took the stairs leading up to her office and the bedroom, and tried not to remember the night she and Romo had made love on the landing, early in their relationship. They’d been out with her friends, teasing each other with looks and touches, with no question in either of their minds where and how the night would end. They hadn’t even made it all the way up the stairs before they’d collapsed, twined together, needing each other so much it had seemed like madness.

Blushing, she stepped into her office, crossing quickly to the locked gun cabinet in the far corner, where she kept not only the small .22-caliber handgun she’d purchased just after al-Jihad’s reign of terror began, but also her medical supplies. The elegant cabinet was far more graceful—and much less expensive—than a safe. She dialed in the combination and popped the door, then stood and stared for a second at the large tackle box she’d outfitted as a field kit.

She’d freshened her supplies regularly over the past year. With al-Jihad hitting targets in and around Bear Claw, she’d wanted to be prepared for emergencies. She’d never actually used the thing, though. Had hoped she’d never have to. She couldn’t handle the immediacy of living medicine, the emotions. Now, facing the prospect of working on a man she’d known intimately, a man she’d loved, she quailed. She’d never understood how her mother reveled in the godlike act of cutting into living flesh. Then again, she’d failed to understand a number of her mother’s choices over the years.

You can do this, she told herself, squaring her shoulders and reaching for the medical kit. You have to do this. He’d trusted her enough to put his life and safety in her hands. She would reward that trust by patching him up. Then, once he’s awake, I’ll get some answers out of him, she thought as she returned to his side. Now that she had a plan of sorts, her emotions were starting to shift from dizzying relief at finding him incredibly, impossibly alive…to anger at the deception he’d perpetrated, and his presumption that she’d take him in and treat his wounds on the basis of a note that explained less than nothing.

Leave it to slick, handsome, charming Romo Sampson to assume she’d take care of him after what he’d done to her.

“Bastard,” she muttered under her breath, holding on to the anger because it steadied her hands as she cut away his jacket and black T-shirt, revealing the strong lines of his back, the angry bullet wound and the streaks of forming bruises.

She removed the bulk of his clothing, save for his boxers, which were cheap chain-store wear, and nothing like what he would’ve worn before.

Shoving that thought aside, she piled several blankets over him, then turned up the heat in the living room. She had to get him warm and find a way to get his fluid volume up. But at the same time, she knew she had to be smart, too; she needed to protect herself if things proved more complicated than her more optimistic hypothesis—that he’d been undercover, the blood spatter was from a clean kill of one of the terrorists, and he was in the clear, fully sanctioned for whatever he’d done.

A quiver in her belly warned that the explanation, when she got it, probably wouldn’t be that neat. Romo had never been one to make things easy—either on her or on himself.

His clothes were damp with sweat and blood, and streaked with dirt and other substances. His pockets were empty save for her spare key; a quick search revealed that he wasn’t carrying any wallet, ID, or weapon. She placed his clothes and boots in a paper bag and taped it shut, signing her name across the tape. Then she locked the bag in the gun cabinet. It wasn’t a perfect chain of evidence and probably wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

It’s just in case, she told herself, and worked very hard not to think about what some of those cases might be.

Returning to him, she found that his color was a little better, his flesh a little warmer beneath the blankets. It seemed very strange that her patient’s skin was flesh-toned and body temperature, but she shoved aside the oddity, locking it down along with her emotions and telling herself to woman up and do what needed doing.

She set him up on a portable monitor that told her what she already knew: his blood pressure, pulse and respiration were all dangerously depressed. Knowing she needed to get his vitals headed on the upswing, she started him on a saline drip. If it came to it, she’d transfuse him with her own blood. She was a type O, a universal donor. But God help her, she hoped it didn’t come to that. She’d already given him everything she intended to of her inner self.

Soon, though, his numbers started coming back up, and his skin and gums pinked, indicating that the shock was fading. Which left her with the bullet wound.

She followed the bruise tracks with her fingers, probing as deeply as she dared. She found three spots where she was pretty sure she felt something. The bullet had fragmented. Damn it.

Doing the best she could, she pulled on sterile gloves, cleaned and numbed the three spots, then chose one and used a scalpel to dissect away the skin and muscle. Without clamps or suction, blood welled immediately, obscuring her working field. She cursed and blotted it with a sterile pad, but gave that up almost immediately as pointless. Instead, she resigned herself to working blind, probing with the scalpel, then forceps.

“Come on…come on…” She was breathing heavily, sweating more from nerves than exertion. Then she felt the forceps lock on to something hard and metallic. “Ah! Gotcha.”

She dropped the bloodstained fragment in a specimen jar, used stitches to close the muscle and incision and then repeated the process twice more. By the time she was done, she’d nearly gotten used to the fact that when she cut into him, he bled. Yet although his vitals had stabilized where they needed to be, he hadn’t moved or made a sound. He just lay there, breathing. In and out. In and out.

Forcing herself not to watch the rhythmical fall of his back, she returned to her work, stitching up the last of the three cuts before turning her attention to the recovered fragments. When she pieced the ragged bits of metal together in their specimen jar, it looked as though she’d gotten all of the projectile. The metal was deformed, making it impossible for her to be sure, but without an X-ray, there wasn’t much more she could do.

She cleaned the entry wound as best she could, then closed it as well, leaving a spot at the bottom for drainage. Finally, she hit her patient with a whopping dose of a broad-spectrum antibiotic. That, plus crossing her fingers, was going to have to be enough. She debated over the painkiller choices she had on-hand, and went with the mildest. He’d be hurting when he awoke—she deliberately thought “when,” not “if,” as though positive thinking would be enough to pull him out of the deep unconsciousness that continued to hold on to him. But it was that very unconsciousness that meant she couldn’t give him one of the stronger painkillers, which had sedative effects.

She needed him to wake up, needed to get a grip on whether the head injury that had blown his pupils to uneven sizes had caused serious damage. If it had, she’d be doing him a major injustice keeping him hidden. But it wasn’t as if she had a CAT scan or an MRI handy.

Her training warred with her conscience. She knew she should take him to the ER, where he could be properly cared for. But at the same time, despite what had happened between them, she had to believe that Romo never would have perpetuated a fraud of any sort—never mind faking his own death—if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary.

As a child, he’d lived through scandal and a trial when his businessman father had been framed for embezzlement by a coworker. Thanks to solid police work and an ambitious public defender on her way up the political ladder, Romo’s father had been acquitted, the other man jailed. Gratitude, and that early exposure to justice, had set Romo on his path to a career in law enforcement.

Sara had heard the story for the first time at his funeral. She also hadn’t realized he’d come to Bear Claw via the Las Vegas PD. That it’d taken his funeral for her to learn that much about his past had bothered her. At the same time, it’d made her wish she could have one last chance to confront him. She’d imagined herself demanding to know what had gone wrong between them, why he’d done what he’d done, even knowing about her past and how badly his actions would hurt her.

Now, though, her sketchy knowledge of his childhood only served to reinforce Sara’s instinct to follow the instructions in his note. He’d gone into police work looking for justice, undoubtedly moving into internal affairs for the same reason. And though he might leave something to be desired on a personal level, she simply couldn’t see him joining the terrorists’ cause.

Having done what she could for him, she leaned back on her heels and considered her options. She couldn’t lift him by herself, and even if she could, she’d risk tearing the heck out of the stitches. So he’d be staying on the floor for the time being. She did manage, through a combination of leverage and no small amount of tugging, to get a thin camping mattress underneath him, helping keep him warm as well as getting him off the bloodstained floor.

“I’ll deal with the cleanup later,” she said aloud, wrinkling her nose. But, the immediate issues dealt with, she became aware that she was a mess, and the room didn’t smell all that pretty. Maybe she should deal with cleanup sooner than later. This was her home, after all.

Trying not to wonder why he’d come to her rather than whoever he’d been working with since his faked death, she moved around the house, closing the curtains and shutting the blinds, lest a casual—or not so casual—observer chanced to look in the windows. As she did so, small shivers marched their way along her skin, warning her that she hadn’t yet thought through all the ramifications of what she’d done, or the question of what she was planning to do next.

Life or death, he’d written. If the terrorists knew about him, if he feared they would kill him if he surfaced, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’d be looking for him? But if that were the case, why wouldn’t he want Fax, Seth and the few other agents he trusted to know he was alive? Again, why had he come to her?

That made her pause. What if he really had been working for—

“No,” she said aloud, refusing to go there. The Romo she’d known would never in a million years have switched sides. She knew that for certain. Everything else was just going to have to wait until he woke up.

Still, partly because she didn’t want him hurting himself if he started thrashing, partly because her head wasn’t quite as sure of him as her heart wanted to be, she pulled a couple of bungee cords from the camping equipment she kept piled in her office closet. Wrapping the cords around his waist and over his wrists, she bound his arms, then did the same with his ankles.

He didn’t stir over the next couple of hours, as she showered and changed, made herself a quick dinner and then freshened the living room as best she could. Finally, near midnight, her body drained of the frenetic, nervous energy that had been driving her up to that point, and she sagged with a sudden onslaught of fatigue.

Romo was stable enough for her to detach the monitors and saline as he moved into the recovery phase of his injuries, when she’d need to be watching for infection or other signs that she’d missed something with the relatively crude care she’d been able to provide. Telling herself it only made sense to stay near him, in case problems arose during the night, she clicked on a night-light in the kitchen to provide a low level of illumination, and bedded down on the couch with a couple of pillows and a thick, soft afghan.

Although she ached with fatigue, her brain kept her restless and wide-awake for far too long. It took almost superhuman effort not to watch him sleep and wonder what had happened to him, what would happen next. It was even harder to keep herself from remembering their times together, both good and bad, all of them tainted with the ache of betrayal and heartache. Eventually, though, she dozed. As she did, she let her hand dangle off the edge of the couch, so her fingertips just brushed the edges of his blanket. Finally, she slipped into a deep sleep.

She awoke hours later, roused by a sound, or maybe just an instinct. Going into doctor mode, she rolled over and moved to rise, opening her eyes as she did so. She froze for a half second at the sight of the empty spot where Romo had been.

Panic sluiced through her and she moved to react, but it was already too late. A man’s figure rose above her, silhouetted in the dim light. She saw the glint of his eyes and teeth, and the shadows of his hands as he reached for her, grabbed on to her, his grip hard and hurtful.

Screaming, she exploded from the couch, but it was already too late. His hands covered her mouth and pressed her back down into the cushions, cutting off her air. Smothering her.

HE BORE DOWN while his enemy grabbed his hands, his wrists, her fingernails digging in as she fought, squirming and bucking against him. And yes, it was a woman, though that didn’t make her any less the enemy. Why else had she kept him bound as she slept? She was one of them. One of the ones who hunted him, who wanted him dead. One of the ones whose faces had haunted him in his nightmares and dragged him back to consciousness.

“Who are you?” he said, his voice rasping with the effort his weakened self was expending to hold on to her, as sharp pain flared in his shoulder.

She whiplashed against him, her legs kicking out and meeting nothing but air. Not a trained fighter, his brain cataloged, but he already could’ve guessed that from the way she’d bound him, with cords that had stretched easily under pressure.

He must’ve been weaker than he’d thought, though, because seconds later she got away from him, clawing and kicking. She hit the floor hard, scrambled up and bolted for the door, screaming.

“Damn it!” Heart hammering—and not just from the fight—he lunged and his legs folded beneath him. Landing hard, he reached out with his good arm, snagged her by an ankle and yanked, bringing her down with him. Strength failing, head pounding with a relentless beat, he went with expediency and lay full length atop her, pinning her with his weight.

She struggled, still screaming, though her screams had turned to words. A name. Romo.

He didn’t know the name, not really, but he was starting to remember the room. They had fallen halfway into a kitchen; a small night-light was on, allowing him to see more details of the homey, feminine space, and triggering the memory of coming to the house earlier in the day, knowing he’d be safe.

But if he was safe, why the hell had she tied him up? And why the hell was he practically naked?

Scowling, he glared down at his captive. She’d gone still and had stopped screaming, but her face was pale even in the diffuse light, her eyes stark and staring. And a hell of a face it was, too, even terrified.

He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes or hair, beyond knowing that they were both light-hued. But the dimness didn’t detract from the elegant lines of her face and swanlike neck, the sculpted arches of her eyebrows and the wide bow of her mouth. Beneath him, her body was lithe and strong—he could feel that strength in the sore places on his shin and arms, and the burn of his injured shoulder where she’d yanked against him in her struggles. But although she was strong, she was also wholly feminine, her curves pressing against him, bringing a stir of memory—this one older and more deeply buried.

As he lay atop her, he belatedly realized that he’d come here, to this woman, because he’d trusted her to help him.

Shame washed through him. Guilt. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t let her up. “I was dreaming. Nightmare. Then I woke up, not sure where I was, and my arms and legs were tied.”

She took a shallow breath and he thought she might scream again. Instead, she said, “Your note didn’t give me much to go on. I was trying not to be stupid. Apparently, the bungees were borderline on the stupid factor.” He gave her credit for guts, though even as she tried to play it cool, her voice shook.

A roil of memories he couldn’t pin down, couldn’t place, had him stilling and loosening his hold, then rolling onto his side, taking her with him. She was free to move away, but she didn’t. Instead, she lay there facing him, her eyes searching his.

“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice hitching on a suppressed sob. “What happened to you?”

I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am. Who you are. Who we were together. That was what he should’ve said. Instead, he found himself staring, filling himself with the sight of her. Though he was no longer touching her, he felt her curves as though they’d been imprinted on his flesh, creating new memories to replace the ones that were gone. A wellspring of loneliness surged from nowhere and everywhere at once—an ache of longing and a deep sense of loss.

He reached for her blindly, moving purely on instinct. Incredibly, she met him halfway in a kiss that started soft and gentle. Then her lips parted on a small moan of surrender and he slipped his tongue inside to touch hers, tangle with hers. He stroked her hair, her face. She cupped his cheek in her palm.

And, for the first time since he’d regained consciousness in the forest, he felt as though he was exactly where he belonged.